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Shaw Festival's not just for theatre mavens anymore: Wednesday Matinée

New artistic director Tim Carroll shakes things up with new repertoire and productions in unusual spaces.

As part of his effort to open up the Shaw Festival to the community, new artistic director Tim Carroll invited migrant farmers to a production of 1837: The Farmers' Revolt (with Jonah McIntosh). (DAVID COOPER)

When Tim Carroll first attended the Shaw Festival — he was seeing the 2014 production of J.B. Priestley’s comedy When We Are Married, invited by an actor in the play, Kate Hennig — he recalls thinking the tiny, idyllic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake was “unusual.”

As opposed to Stratford, where he was living and directing King John for the Stratford Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake felt practically like Pleasantville.

“There’s a real intense civic pride, the flower beds and the park are all absolutely pristine. You come to a place that’s so manicured, it’s hard to adjust to it without thinking you’re in The Truman Show,” Carroll said from his office at the Shaw Festival, where he’s about to launch his first season as the festival’s artistic director.

Since the announcement of his appointment in 2015, the formerly London-based director, who has worked primarily across Europe and in New York City, has gotten to know his new town and was pleasantly surprised to find Niagara-on-the-Lake has an edge when you know where to look.

“I live in a small apartment across the street from the Angel Inn, and every Friday and Saturday evening it’s just like any county town in England. There’s a cover band playing too loud and there are people spilling out making noise, and I rather like that. At that moment, it doesn’t feel like a quaint little village at all,” Carroll mused.

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In his first season, which kicks off with his production of Saint Joan on Thursday, Carroll continues to alter the traditional way that the festival interacts with its surroundings and the people who live there.

This was obvious immediately in his choice of plays, only three of which fall under the festival’s early mandate of producing plays either written by George Bernard Shaw or during his lifetime; others include avant-garde critical hits from off-Broadway.

Then came announcements of a new bus route to bring Torontonians directly to the festival and back, and of the first ever Shaw Festival wintertime production, A Christmas Carol, this November and December.

As well, Carroll is aiming to provoke the Shaw audience into engaging with the festival in a new way with auxiliary programming.

“I wanted to break out and I wanted to let the audience break in,” Carroll said.

“I really wanted to get our work out of the building and in front of two groups. One that would come to the Shaw but don’t know we’re here yet — sometimes in the theatre you can forget how invisible you are to people when you’re not in their world. And I also wanted to get out to people that would never be able to come to us.”

As part of that plan — and inspired by Carroll’s work directing shows that toured to English prisons, as well as one that featured a cast of inmates — one festival production has been untethered from a single location.

Eric Coates’ production of 1979 by Michael Healey, a drama about former prime minister Joe Clark, will not only pop up for “unplugged” performances throughout July at the Royal George and Courthouse theatres before landing in the Studio for two weeks in October; it’s travelling through the Niagara Region, to venues that rarely host theatrical performances, for audiences that rarely get to see them.

It has already been staged in a homeless shelter in St. Catharines and will go to a home for at-risk youth, followed by more engagements that have yet to be confirmed.

Another production, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt directed by Philip Akin, recently hosted a group of 150 migrant farm workers from the area.

“Not only had they never been to the Shaw, but they had never been to any live event in Canada at all,” Carroll said. “And to me, it was pleasing to bring the farmers of today and tomorrow, and give them a play about the farmers who made the Canada we live in now.”

Regular theatregoers also have a chance to see the festival in a new light this year. The Secret Theatre is a lineup of unknown performances in secret locations: audience members simply show up, witness whatever the performers have up their sleeves and are sworn not to reveal spoilers. This idea was born out of Carroll’s London company, The Factory.

“It seems to me that there’s something different about an audience who would come along with that kind of leap of faith,” Carroll said. “They come with a kind of party vibe and an understanding that it’s not only up to performers to determine whether we have a good time.

“I’ve always been put into positions where I have to work with audiences I’m unfamiliar with, and you realize that those are the moments that really reveal something to you about yourself. Those places that are outside your comfort zone: that is when the magic happens.”

In his time in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Carroll has also met what he calls the “theatre hounds” of the Shaw Festival: locals who attend each play about seven or eight times a season. Though he’s received an angry letter or two for the shakeups he’s made in the Shaw program, Carroll said most of the Shaw diehards he knows are excited for new encounters and new audiences.

“The biggest thing for them is for the festival to thrive. So they’re the first people to come to me and say that it’s great to have the bus so now we can get more young people to the festival, so it’s ‘not just the oldies like us.’ They’re very passionate about the need for rejuvenation.”

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